Oz the Great and Powerful: Michelle Williams interview

Michelle Williams has won critical acclaim playing tortured characters in My
Week with Marilyn and Blue Valentine. But now she's ready for some fun.
First up, a role in Oz the Great and Powerful that she dedicates to her
daughter by Heath Ledger.

Actress Michelle Williams open up about her dark past and why she's finally ready to step into the lightPhoto: Francine Orr

Michelle Williams has made a career out of playing dark, often tragic characters.

From Brokeback Mountain (2005), in which she played the heartbroken wife of a gay cowboy, to Blue Valentine (2010), about the disintegration of a marriage, and My Week with Marilyn (2011) about the screen legend’s relationship with a young Englishman, she has cornered the market in complex vulnerability.

All three of those roles led to Oscar nominations.

‘I have spent a long time exploring what keeps people apart from each other, and the secrets that make them feel like they are unlovable,’ she says. ‘People’s failings, blind spots, inconsistencies, that’s where my heart lies.’

Her latest role, in Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful (from Sam Raimi, the director of Spider-Man), marks a radical departure.

A prequel to L Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it tells the story of how Oscar Diggs, a Kansas magician and conman (James Franco), came to be the wizard. Williams plays Glinda the Good Witch.

‘I fly around in a bubble. My daughter thinks I can really fly,’ says Williams, who took the part as a ‘love letter’ to seven-year-old Matilda, her daughter with the late actor Heath Ledger.

She and Ledger met on the set of Brokeback Mountain. They had parted when he died of an accidental overdose in 2008 and she is now in a relationship with the actor Jason Segel (How I Met Your Mother).

‘I think this movie fell into my life at the right time. My daughter and I needed it,’ she says. Williams takes a sip of coffee and gently places her cup on the table.

Williams and the rest of the cast in Dawson's Creek (REX FEATURES)

‘I wanted to make something that my daughter would feel proud of and excited about…’

Unable to finish the sentence, she becomes visibly emotional – partly, I assume, because it raises painful memories, but also because we are speaking the day after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in which 20 children and six adults lost their lives.

It is impossible to avoid the subject of the tragedy.

‘I found out as soon as I got home, yesterday,’ begins Williams. ‘I can’t imagine what those families are going through.’ She stops talking and wipes away the tears with her hand. We are both silent, unable to talk. She shakes her head.

‘You realise when you become a mother that the way you love your own child is not special. My love for Matilda isn’t exceptional or noteworthy. It’s what every mother in this world feels for their kid.’

I am talking to Williams over lunch – she orders soup, cheese and crackers and a cappuccino – in a Los Angeles hotel. She is bare-legged, dressed in a sleeveless J Brand black leather dress and high leopard-print Louboutins – clothes a stylist has chosen for her.

‘This isn’t me,’ she says of her outfit. ‘This is like a version of me, somebody else’s idea. I like it and it’s fun to play with but I’m a jeans and T-shirt person.’

The actress is petite, her hair a platinum-blonde crop, shaved at the back. The style might look severe on anyone else but only serves to throw Williams’ delicate features into sharp relief.

Sweet and warm, she could, at 32, pass for a teenager. It’s easy to see how the image of the actress encased in a bubble, wearing a white gown and carrying a wand, would captivate a child.

Williams with her Blue Valentine co-star Ryan Gosling

‘Matilda went through a phase where she would go up to people at the park and say, “My mummy is Glinda the Good Witch, she’s a fairy princess.” My daughter thinks that I could do magic,’ she says quietly.

There are more tears followed by embarrassed laughter. ‘Oh, man! Why can’t I stop crying? But I wanted to bring some magic into our lives.’

Even though Williams has had a stellar career, which took off when she was cast, aged 17, in the hit television show Dawson’s Creek, magic has apparently been in pretty short supply in her life.

She spent her early childhood in Montana, with her younger sister, Paige, and three older half siblings from her father’s first marriage.

The family moved to San Diego when Williams was nine; her mother Carla took care of the children, her father Larry was a commodities trader. I tell her I’ve read that he was also a writer and amateur explorer: ‘I just can’t talk about that,’ she says.

There is another lengthy pause for thought. Williams won’t discuss her father (her parents are now divorced) but there are hints that her relationship with him has been complicated and she has said previously that she has had little contact with him in recent years.

‘I can say that I see those two people, my parents, compressed into one inside of me. There’s a homemaker, and there’s someone who wants to go digging around in dark caves. These days I’m apt to be found at home, but I do have a side that's partly gypsy.’

As a child, she says, ‘there were a bunch of kids my age that were going to LA to auditions and I was just one of them. I was just kind of swept up in a tide – a little minnow swimming along.’

Ryan Gosling, her Blue Valentine co-star, has described her as ‘a cross between Brigitte Bardot and Clint Eastwood’, while Sam Raimi says she is ‘brilliant, a force of nature’. But Williams insists, ‘There is nothing special about me.’

She also says that she has never felt pretty. ‘I don’t know why I don’t feel good about myself. I’ve accepted myself now; that’s a good thing.’

Playing Marilyn Monroe, she says, helped her to ‘make a kind of peace with my femininity, because that’s been an aspect of myself that I’ve denied personally and professionally, but I certainly wouldn’t put the word beautiful next to me.

'I also think it's a minor quality. Who cares? I hope that I’m patient. I hope I’m compassionate. I hope I’m consistent. I hope I’m fun.’

Williams began acting professionally at eight; her first film role, in 1994, was in a remake of Lassie.

‘It seemed exciting to my parents. They were from Montana; they wanted their kids to have a little bit more opportunity – every parent wants more for her kid. I think on the outside when you see your kid audition, it seems very glamorous.

'Then you realise it’s kind of like a horrible factory that you’re feeding your children into.’

Williams with her daughter, Matilda, and her actor boyfriend Jason Segal, in New York last year (REX FEATURES)

When she was 15, Williams legally emancipated herself from her parents and moved to Los Angeles on her own.

‘All I can say is that it was a strange and bizarre choice that was bolstered by the agreement of my parents. When I think of my own daughter…’ She trails off.

‘I couldn’t do it, I’d be so afraid. Now, when I meet 15-year-olds, I worry about them because you’re such easy prey at 15.’

‘Living alone in a little apartment was terrible,’ she says. ‘I furnished it from Ikea. I didn’t know how to make a home, so I slept on an egg crate on the floor, and the only thing I knew was how to make pasta, but I didn’t understand portions, so I would dump the whole box of pasta in the pan, heat up an entire jar of sauce, and put melted cheese slices on top.

'I was just a kid.’ She throws me a concerned look and tells me she doesn’t want to come across as a victim. ‘These are just facts. There is nothing about it that’s a pity party. I don’t mean it like, “Oh, poor me.”’

Williams says she was ‘very, very lonely’. She admits that there were damaging experiences during those years, but the subject is clearly painful and she doesn’t want to elaborate.

‘All I can say is that I am very lucky to have survived it healthy, whole and functioning, that whatever got broken got put back together.’

Those difficult teenage years must have informed many of her complex characters, such as the drifter she portrays in Wendy and Lucy and the grieving mother she inhabits in Incendiary (both 2008).

‘I think the thing that is so great about my work is that it expels things from your body and your mind. Sometimes I feel like it’s helped me burn through things so that my own life feels much more free and happy in comparison.’

Williams in Wendy and Lucy

No wonder Williams enjoyed making Oz. There is no tragedy, no turmoil, just some romantic problems concerning the arrogant Oscar Diggs.

A storm sweeps him away in a hot-air balloon; he lands in Oz, where he meets Glinda and two other witches: Evanora, the evil ruler of the Emerald City (played by Rachel Weisz), and her tormented sister, Theodora (Mila Kunis).

‘It’s the story of a selfish man who becomes a great and selfless wizard,’ says Sam Raimi. ‘Through the love of Glinda he gets a second chance to become a better person.’

As a director Raimi was, says Williams, ‘wonderful. He wasn’t a screamer. Sometimes directors are like your dad. I knew Sam wouldn’t be like a mean father.’

An added bonus was that her daughter had a playmate: Rachel Weisz’s son, Henry.

‘Our kids really loved each other. It was very nice for Matilda to meet somebody whose mum is also acting in movies. I think there was some kind of comfort in that. They get along fantastically.’

Away from the film set Williams is focused on living a ‘normal life’ in New York with Matilda. Single motherhood is, she says, ‘very difficult, not for the faint of heart.

'But whenever I feel like I am unlucky I think about how many mums are in the exact situation that I am in but who have to figure out how they’re going to afford to get food on the table and can’t afford consistent and reliable childcare.

'When I have to go to work I know who’s taking care of my daughter. I know she’s in good hands and I’m not worried about her.’

Williams as Glinda the Good Witch in Oz the Great and Powerful

Would she like more children?

‘The truth is, I would love more kids, but if I don’t have any more I won’t feel like I missed out on anything, because my own fills me up to the top. Matilda is so fascinating, she teaches me so much, and she keeps me on my toes.

'She has taught me how to…’ Her eyes start to water, and she covers her face with her hands and smiles. ‘I’m going to cry again.’

She won’t discuss her relationship with Segel. ‘I probably shouldn’t. I want to be as transparent here with you as I am on screen but then I’ll wind up saying things and afterwards I’ll be like, “Oh, Michelle! You should have shut your mouth!”’

But she does say she finally feels settled and secure. ‘I am much more accepting of who I am and where I am. I see pictures of myself from five years ago or four years ago and I look very unhappy and scared. I feel better.’

Acting remains a passion. ‘I still love it because I can feel myself getting better at it. It’s the only thing that I know how to do.’

Her next film is Suite française, based on the Irène Némirovsky novel and directed by Saul Dibb (The Line of Beauty and The Duchess).

‘I keep getting these wonderful opportunities. I want nothing other than where I am now – this is more than I dreamt of.’